Closing in on the "God particle."

Physicists shut down the
Tevatron particle
collider near Chicago in October, but further analysis of its data has yielded signs of the
elusive Higgs boson.

The boson is considered the last, as-yet unproven sub-atomic particle that physicists need to
help stitch together a long-held theory that explains the underlying structure of matter. The Higgs
would help explain why some particles have mass while other particles, such as the photon, do
not.

This so-called “God particle” is predicted to exist based on the theory of electroweak
unification, which puts the electric force and the weak-nuclear force into the same theoretical
framework.

The Tevatron was closed because research support, and funding, shifted to the Large Hadron
Collider near Geneva. But researchers were hopeful that the Higgs might still be found in Tevatron
particle collision data that had yet to be analyzed. The
latest news
release from Fermilab indicates physicists are finding "hints" the Higgs exists.